The company announced that a new live entertainment venue off the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street will be modeled after KC’s iconic, bygone Willis Wood Theatre.

The original theater opened in 1902 at 11th and Baltimore streets and stretched for a block and a half. It was a cultural hub for the city before it burned down in January 1917.
— The Kansas City Star

Featuring large Ionic columns and Baroque embellishments, the Willis Wood Theater, was designed by Louis Curtiss, Canadian-born American architect noted as one of KC's most prominent architects. It is speculated that Walt Disney frequented the theater when he was living in KC. “It is... View full entry

Completed in 1905 in one of Kansas City, Missouri's oldest neighborhoods, the Westport Presbyterian Church was in dire need of repair after suffering from a catastrophic fire in 2011. Undertaking all the technical challenges that come with a project of this nature, architecture practice BNIM... View full entry

Completed in 1954 for Robert and Marianne Snower, Marcel Breuer designed the house site unseen. The Snowers had reached out to Breuer after seeing his work in a magazine, and lived there until it was bought in 2014.The current owners, Rob Barnes and Karen Bisset, then renovated some key aspects of... View full entry

Each of the 16 bus stops that competed this year — and the agencies who oversee them — deserved a thorough shaming. No transit rider should ever have to wait in the rain for a bus with no posted schedule, or walk in a ditch along an eight-lane highway after disembarking. These conditions are deplorable but all too common in American cities.

The two bus stops facing off today — in Kansas City and Silver Spring [...]— had some extra dreadful quality that sets them apart in the eyes of our voters.
— usa.streetsblog.org

Make It Right, the non-profit organization founded by actor Brad Pitt in 2007, recently revealed six new single-family housing designs for the Manheim Park neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. The single-family homes will be built on vacant lots directly across the Bancroft School Apartments, an... View full entry

Make It Right, an organization that helps communities rebuild after environmental or economic disasters, opened its most recent project in Kansas City, Missouri this past Saturday. The project focused on the abandoned and badly damaged Bancroft School plot, renovating the school building into... View full entry

For retailers, daylight offered one additional advantage the advertisements did not mention: the implication of moral virtue. Large department stores were described as cesspools of fraud, filth, poor working conditions, child labor, anti-competitiveness, potential press censorship (because of their advertising clout), disease, drunkenness, savagery, prostitution, suicide and darkness. A well-lit interior, it was said, could do much to counter such negative associations.
— Places Journal

Earlier this year on Places, Keith Eggener assessed the career of the now forgotten early 20th-century Kansas City architect Louis Curtiss, and argued that Curtiss's obscurity has less to do with intrinsic merit than with the politics of professional reputation. In a new article... View full entry

A dandy bedecked in flashy all-white outfits and a pince-nez, chain-smoking custom-made cigarettes that he ordered from a New York manufacturer in lots of 10,000... an early devotee of the motorcar, president of the local Automobile Club, and a notably fast and reckless driver... He paid his rent in gold coins, before moving to an opulently furnished, Oriental-themed downtown Kansas City apartment/studio building of his own design.
— Places Journal

Why is Louis Curtiss so much less celebrated than Bernard Maybeck? On Places, Keith Eggener examines the career of the Kansas City architect, "designer of some of the earliest buildings in the world to employ caisson foundations, rolled steel columns and glass curtain-walls," who nonetheless... View full entry